Rant of the Day: Why tanks are weak
There will be a pretty long wall of text ahead, so lets not waste time: I've been studying game design since I've learned what game design is. I'm in no way a professional in the area, but I do have a decent grasp. Please do not be one of those "Hurr Durr you bronze, you know nothing Jon Snow". Yes, I'm bronze. It doesn't mean that I'm retarded (it does men that I have the mechanical skill of a retarded mongoose, but I digress) and can't understand the game. With that out of the way, let's get to the fun part: The poorly written wall of text! YAY!
>WINDOWS OF POWER
>Note: Not mentioning Supports as they can either fall on a mage category or a Tank category which will be mentioned ahead. If they don't fall in those areas, they end up in the utility category (Janna, Sona, Soraka, Bard, etc), which is not related to the point of this post. We're talking about damage and tankiness, not CC and utility.
Windows of power are pretty damn popular in League right now and almost every champion has it, but what are they?
Windows of power are moments in which a champion is much stronger than he normally is. The last iteration of 
was easily the best example of windows of power, as he had 2 easily understandable ones: If he ever stacked up his 5 runes he'd get a huge shield and CDR boost, turning him into a tanky spell spamming mage. If he ever decided to press R, he'd become an AoE spell vamping Mage that was able to run really fast for some reason. If he ever combined both, he'd become a god among men capable of destroying entire teams. What made him balanced was that you could predict his biggest one by the number of runes and the playstyle needed to achieve the 5. Is Ryze spamming his Q to keep himself at 3-4 runes? He wants to all in when his Passive proc. Is he just using it to farm and keeping it at 1 rune tops? He just wants to farm and is safe-ish to engage.
New 
also does it in a not that fun or exciting manner with his new Q. After his second Q his nope bar goes red and you, the Vlad player, knows it's time to go ham, while your enemy knows it's time to back off.
has a similar thing going on with her 5 stacks. 
Has it with his 4th shot. 
with his fully stacked Hemorrage. 
, 
, 
, 
, and many others with their ults.
Even an assassin having his abilities off cooldown is a window of power, as he becomes much more threatening than usual.
In League, most windows of power (ok, I'm tired of typing windows of power all the time, I'll call them WOPs from now on) are the core of a champion. New Vlad would be ridiculously weak without his Empowered Q, as would Swain without his ult. As those WOPs are so important to a champion's identity while being really powerful, the entire champion is balanced around that window. Most classes possessed WOPs.
Burst (, 
) and Utility Mages (
, 
) have it on their abilities being up. Battle Mages (
, 
) and Artilery mages (
, 
) don't really have a WOP, as their abilties are much more about consistent DPS and it's a fairly safe assumption that they always have it up.
Juggernauts, divers and fighters in general all have it in a way or another. Darius has his bonus AD at 5 stacks. Yasuo has his Shield + Third Q + Armor penetration. Yi has his Ult. Trynd Has his ult. Fiora has her ult. Irelia has her Ult. They all have a somewhat short window that grants them extra power.
Assassins have WOPs simply by having their abilities up. This is pretty simple: A Zed with his ult up is much more scary than a Zed without it. Same goes for Talon, Fizz and a few others. They have a window of time in which they are a massive threat and then they become at most a small annoyance. Some other assassins have a smaller impact during their WOP, but have it up more often. 
and 
being prime examples of it (Kha actually has a healthy mix of both. He doesn't relies on long CDs to have his WOP, but if he ever manages to catch many low health enemies his WOP becomes much stronger and impactful).
Only two classes have no real WOPs: Tanks and ADCs. This is because of their consistent nature. ADCs are meant to keep the DPS up, at the cost of having little to no burst. Tanks are meant to endure the damage dealt to them during an entire team fight and be the last man standing after it's over.
And here is the problem. ADCs have been given plenty of windows of power lately. Their kits are burstier, they have fully stacked fervor that hits hard and they have another problem with itemization (that will be expanded later on). They have all this while keeping their consistent DPS. They are not giving up on consistency to have windows of power. Either during or after their WOP, they are scary motherfuckers who can deal crap loads of damage.
Putting WOPs on ADCs makes them much more fun to play and Riot is probably right in doing so. However if a Tank biggest weakness is getting such power tucked in it's kit at no (or very small) costs, then Tanks will obviously need some love to do their jobs properly.
>ITEMS
Items are becoming a big problem for Tanks right now. Not because of tank items, but because of the damage items. We have a few outliers and I'll go over them one by one.
- This item is one of the main problems when it comes to putting it on ADCs. On melee champions, it serves mostly as an anti-kite tool. On an ADC it's active becomes a huge on demand WOP as they can fully utilize the 40% AS bonus (as they don't waste time walking to hit a target). The added flat pen is a minor thing that when combined with a few other items on this list can cause some extra problems for tanks.
- 30% of your armor gone in 6 attacks. Not auto attacks, any attacks. Not ignored, but reduced for every AD champion in the enemy team to benefit. Good bye tank stats. This basicly puts any AD champion in an WOP against the target of the one with the black cleaver.
/
- Those two bad boys are the terror of any tank. If you are a sustain tank (, 
) the first will easily shut down your main source of sustain. If you are going full tank relying on Armor and Health (
, 
, 
, well, bad news kid. You bonus armor is only 55% effective, while your health is used to increase the enemy damage against you.
> Some tank busting math.
> Let's assume a regular full tank build vs an AD heavy team (but still with some AP, as it's the usual). It should probably be something like this:
> 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
.
> This build would offer:
> 2000 Health (5340 gold invested)
> 280 Armor (5600 gold invested)
> And stats we won't focus on such as
> 55 MR
>30% CDR
> 10% crit reduction
>
> Pretend the one buying it is a Rammus for the sake of precise math. He has 2026 base health and 104 base armor. With this build (not gonna take W in consideration) he reaches 4026 health and 384 Armor.
>
> One already neglects 126 of his armor, removing 2520 gold in stats from the target. Almost the same cost of the Item itself (2700), which also gives bonus damage and 50 AD.
>
> One would neglect 116 points of armor, removing 2320 gold in stats from the target. With it's other stats, the item becomes extremely gold efficient.
>
> Of course, when combing them, they offer reduced benefits, but they still keep themselves pretty damn gold efficient, while making tank builds gold inneficient.
The itemization problem is simple: ADCs are getting to turn tank items into gold inneficient items with unrivalled ease.
WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
The solution is relatively simple, yet demanding from Riot's balance team. Champion wise, Tanks need bigger WOP, specially non-diving tanks. Tanks like Malphite, Amumu and Sejuani don't really need extra survivabilty because their job is to start a fight, not be particularly disruptive after it already begun. Tanks like Rammus, Shen and Cho'Gath, however, have the job of peeling and annoying as much as possible and, for it, they need that extra power.
Think of how tanky a Nautilus feel with that 1k shield, or that Maokai reducing damage all around by 20%. We need more tanks with WOP like that. If not to make them feel better to play, to survive the ADCs' WOP blowing tanks to pieces.
In terms of itemization, small cuts into the power of Last Whisper family and TBC are in order. They are the tank busting items, but currently, they are flawed. The Last Whisper does it's job extremely well, having it's passive worth over 2k gold against Full tanks while the item itself costs only 2700 is a bit ridiculous (and the item itself is worth about 1800 without the passives). The Black Cleaver is currently serving many purposes. It gives squishy deleting potential, it gives CDR and it gives tank deleting potential, not to mention it also makes the ADC harder to burst down with extra hp and harder to get with extra kiting potential. Right now, TBC is giving ADCs everything they might desire, further increasing tank's problems.
Small afterthought
Saying that Tanks don't have WOPs is unfair. Quite a lot of them have it. However, it is a pretty small once in comparassion to the ones the ADCs are getting due to the fact that damage outscales resistences by a great amount right now.
TL;DR
ADCs have stronger Windows of Power in their kits than Tanks. Ghostblade adds another Window of Power for them. and makes tank items gold inneficient as fuck. The result is tanks dying much faster than in previous seasons.
The solution is either toning down those items or toning up tank options, while giving increased windows of power to lackluster tanks.
